Christ’s Holy Wound from the Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg.
Attributed to Jean le Noir, before 1349
Attributed to Jean le Noir, before 1349
Excerpt:
There are medieval religious instructions for praying with this type of illuminated manuscript which invite the viewer to caress and kiss the lacerations. In one existing manuscript, the pigment has been rubbed off of the lips of the wound’s opening by an especially devote patron (Monti). Other illuminated books feature an actual cut in the paper that runs the length of the wound; the viewer is invited to penetrate the slit, fostering a transcendent viewing experience whereby the sensual allows access to a spiritual moment (Monti). Thus, Christ’s vaginal wounds are the ‘‘object of adoration and love but also the object of violence’’ (Lochrie, 190). They are fetishized as mystical parts of a perfect whole and abruptly isolated into bloody ailments subjected to profane treatment. This duality is often apparent in the treatment of women in the contemporary era: they are reduced to the somatic, yet specific body parts are idealized; their beauty is revered, but their sexuality is debased. The fascination with and fear of the female form is a longstanding truth of the human, especially male, psyche. Female sexuality and desires have been dismissed or demonized, as the vagina dentata evidences in its visual incarnations from the Gothic to contemporary periods.
There are medieval religious instructions for praying with this type of illuminated manuscript which invite the viewer to caress and kiss the lacerations. In one existing manuscript, the pigment has been rubbed off of the lips of the wound’s opening by an especially devote patron (Monti). Other illuminated books feature an actual cut in the paper that runs the length of the wound; the viewer is invited to penetrate the slit, fostering a transcendent viewing experience whereby the sensual allows access to a spiritual moment (Monti). Thus, Christ’s vaginal wounds are the ‘‘object of adoration and love but also the object of violence’’ (Lochrie, 190). They are fetishized as mystical parts of a perfect whole and abruptly isolated into bloody ailments subjected to profane treatment. This duality is often apparent in the treatment of women in the contemporary era: they are reduced to the somatic, yet specific body parts are idealized; their beauty is revered, but their sexuality is debased. The fascination with and fear of the female form is a longstanding truth of the human, especially male, psyche. Female sexuality and desires have been dismissed or demonized, as the vagina dentata evidences in its visual incarnations from the Gothic to contemporary periods.
Text by Liz Lorenz
